It All Happened Before

For our final episode, we sat down without a guest to ask ourselves the questions we usually put to others. Has the podcast changed how we see Turkey, the US, and our own positions this season, and are we even reaching for the right words anymore? One answer surprised us: we are rethinking the term democratic backsliding itself. The word suggests a straight line, a country was a democracy, then it...

As we explore the various forms of authoritarianism around the world these days, it can feel like there's no end in sight. That's why this week, we wanted to look for something else: a case that might offer some hope, albeit cautiously. We turn to Brazil, and to Dr. Karabekir Akkoyunlu , a comparative politics scholar working across Turkey, Iran, Brazil, and Indonesia. He walks us through the last...

When we talk about resistance, we tend to picture it: marchers in the street, dissidents with megaphones, confrontation made visible. But in societies where activists are monitored, journalists are constrained, and the costs of speaking out are real and immediate, resistance looks different. It learns to walk around obstacles rather than through them. It becomes quieter, more adaptive, harder to n...

Suzy Hansen's first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World , is one of the books we kept returning to in the conversations that eventually became this podcast. Her account of seeing the United States from the outside — and her reckoning with American exceptionalism helped us name what we were trying to do here: think about the U.S. with Turkey in the frame, a...

When mainstream media gets captured, the story doesn't end — it migrates. In Turkey, journalism moved from legacy newspapers and TV channels to scrappy independent websites, then to YouTube, and now to individual creator channels where the line between reporter and personality has all but dissolved. This week, Istanbul-based journalist Gülsin Harman joins us to map that journey from the inside. Gü...

The Democratic Party is trying to figure out what will work — and the competing forces within it are doing so loudly. In Maine, an oyster farmer and Marine veteran named Graham Platner pushed a sitting Democratic governor out of the Senate primary. In Michigan, physician Abdul El-Sayed is running neck-and-neck with the party-preferred pick. In California, eight Democrats are splitting the field so...

In March 2025, masked federal agents arrested a Turkish PhD student on a Somerville sidewalk as she walked to break her Ramadan fast. Rümeysa Öztürk's offense, according to the Trump administration, was co-authoring a Tufts Daily op-ed critical of the university's response to the war in Gaza. Her F-1 visa had been quietly revoked by the Secretary of State. She spent six weeks in detention, much of...

Americans have been talking about the "deep state" like it's a new discovery. It isn't. Derin devlet is a Turkish coinage — a phrase the rest of the world borrowed from a country that has lived inside conspiratorial politics for so long that the language for it had to be invented there first. There used to be a kind of conspiracy theory that, however wrong, at least tried . It marshaled evidence,...

In 2014, a year after Gezi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan moved into a 1,100-room palace built on Atatürk's protected forest farm — in defiance of court orders that ruled it illegal. In October 2025, Trump's crews demolished the East Wing of the White House to break ground on a $400 million ballroom, financed by anonymous corporate donors with active business before the federal government; this spring, he...

In this episode, we go deep into the role of family in political power, unpacking how nepotism operates under the cloak of democracy. From Donald Trump’s inner circle—Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump—to Turkey’s “damat” politics with Berat Albayrak and Selçuk Bayraktar, we explore how family ties become pathways to influence, wealth, and legitimacy. Building on our conversations about institutions,...

FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatens to revoke broadcast licenses over war coverage. Pete Hegseth demands a more "patriotic press." These declarations feel almost theatrical — and that's exactly the point. They draw attention to the loud, visible pressure, while the quieter kind takes hold inside the newsroom. We welcome a special guest to make sense of these new tactics, and examples from other count...

We started our media capture discussions last episode asking whether what's happening to American media is a rupture or a reckoning. Bilge Yesil's answer, drawn from decades of studying Turkish media, is clarifying and a little unsettling: there was no dramatic breaking point in Turkey either. Just a continuous drift — commercialization, consolidation, political pressure layering on top of market...

In this episode of It All Happened Before, Ekin and Burcu use the CBS controversy as a doorway into a much older story — how media capture works precisely because it doesn't announce itself. Drawing on Turkey's experience of press consolidation, where family publishers became state-friendly conglomerates and the transformation felt gradual until suddenly it wasn't, they ask Americans the uncomfort...

Burcu flew from Germany to Turkey for 36 hours just to vote. She went to the polls right after her back surgery. And still — she's not sure she fully trusts the outcome. In this episode of It All Happened Before, Ekin and Burcu explore what elections look like inside a competitive authoritarian system: formally intact, fiercely contested, and deeply uncertain. With Americans worried about whether...

Some people are surprised by what's happening in America. We are not. It All Happened Before is a conversation between two people who grew up watching democracy erode in Turkey — and who now see the patterns repeating in the country they also call home. In our first episode, we talk about why we started this project, what firsthand experience with authoritarianism actually teaches you, and how we...